Ed gets a Job!

“Happy days are here again, the skies about are clear again, so let’s sing a song of cheer again, happy days are here again.” – a song written in 1921 by J. Yellen and M. Ager

Mr. Clark went underwear shopping the other day and bought four new pairs. Why is this significant? Because, this indicates hard times are not only over in our home, they may be slacking off in other’s homes, as well.

For years, men’s underwear sales have been an indicator of economic health. In fact, the MUI – men’s underwear index – is tracked with other leading indicators like commodity prices, average weekly manufacturing hours and new unemployment claims. (This according to sources including former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, NPR, and The Washington Post.) Since underwear are a necessity, their sales tend to be stable. When times are good, men buy underwear; when times get hard, they stop buying underwear and wear out the ones they have.
Nationwide, men’s underwear sales began to slump last year, just as the recession took hold. In the Clark house, men’s underwear purchases, along with pretty much all other purchases except food, came to a grinding halt with Mr. Clark’s lay-off in July, 2008.

It’s been a long, grueling haul – this past year of unemployment. But, I am proud and so pleased to report it’s over. Mr. Clark has a job again – a good job, with benefits and travel and the type of challenges he dealt with so well during his 25 years as a construction industry computer guy, back when there was a construction industry.

According to reports from retailers, Mr. Clark may not be alone; other folks may be finding work again, too. In a recent Washington Post article, a spokeswoman for Sears said stores are beginning to see more men’s underwear sales, while a spokeswoman for Target said sales have definitely been stronger over the past two months and multi-pair packs are moving again. Some economists are predicting a slow, but steady increase in the MUI through the end of this year and on into 2010. Happy days may, indeed, be - if not here – at least on the way, again.

I sincerely hope this is true – especially for the hundreds of thousands of people who are still out of work in our country right now. We had pretty much hit the wall with regard to money when we got the word that Mr. Clark had been hired. The last of the contract work money had come in, and our reserves were gone. There was enough money left to make the September house payment, and then we’d have to let the foreclosure wheels begin to spin.
Emotionally, we were exhausted, too often angry, tearful, or mean. Being out of work for such a long time will do that to you. It wears you down, destroys your sense of self-worth, and eats at your soul. After a while the person you see in the mirror doesn’t look anything like the person you used to see – the one who had a job, and a life, and some security – the one who used to smile.

It’s hard to look on the bright side when darkness is creeping in all around you. It’s hard to keep the faith; it’s hard to keep on keepin’ on…But, God is good and so are so many people. Family and friends helped out – however they could, whenever they could. People never stopped inquiring about how we were doing and offering words of encouragement. They sent their love, their light and their prayers our way, faithfully, for the whole long past year. And, even in the hardest of times, it was obvious God had a plan, and He was aware of our problems, and if they were to be worked out, He would help us work them out.

It was clear we had much to learn from our financial demise. Some lessons we learned pretty quickly; others we’re still working on...It is clear we must accept this blessing of Mr. Clark’s job, and our return to financial security humbly, thoughtfully, and with great care not to fall back into our past, fool-hardy ways.

My heart goes out to all of those still facing the stress, demoralization, and, at times, sheer terror of prolonged unemployment. May your friends and family help you through, and may you and yours never give up on you. Just when you think you can’t go on much further, something good might just happen - and then you’ll be buying new underwear, too.

Another longtime economic indicator is lipstick sales. During hard times, women buy more lipstick, the thought being it’s a little perk to help one along a rough way. Ironically, I bought two tubes of super-duper long-lasting lipstick last month – one a deep pink, an uncharacteristic color for me. I spent money we didn’t have and I didn’t even feel bad. I wanted people to notice how bright my lips looked – rather than how tired and sad my eyes were – when they glanced my way.

New lip color sales shot up 47% in the first half of this year, but those sales are tapering off now, which means maybe the worst of it is over. Let’s hope so!

Death

Death has always fascinated me. I don’t know why; it just has. So, of course I had to stop and listen the other day, when I stumbled upon an NPR Radio Lab podcast called “11 Meditations on the Moment of Death and What Happens After.”

The first “meditation” involved a doctor named Duncan McDougall, who, in 1907 set out to see if he could prove the soul exited the body after death. Dr. McDougall treated tuberculosis patients, many of whom died. So, he rigged a set of scales which he put patients on when they were about to die.

Back then, the moment of death was considered to be when the last breath was taken, so Dr. McDougall would check the scales just before and right after that. And, he found, on average, patients lost 21 grams the instant they died. He published his research, and The New York Times ran a front page headline that year stating, “Soul has Weight Physician Thinks.”

In 1907 scales were crude, so a weight change of ¾ ounce could’ve been caused by a lot of different things, and 21 grams is statistically insignificant, when factored into a person’s entire body weight, but still…Why the consistent average of 21 grams?

Another of the “meditations” was about changing perceptions in when the time of death is. In Dr. McDougall’s day, and before that, death was considered to be when a person stopped breathing. In the 1960’s, with the advent of CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) the time of death changed to when the heart stopped – for good. A little later, after breathing machines (ventilators) became common, the definition of death became sometime after the brain stopped functioning or when the person was declared “brain dead.” Tricky concept, that…leading to all kinds of difficult decisions about when to “pull the plug,” whether or not to put the person “on the vent”, etc. etc. Tough stuff…

A third NPR podcast “meditation” was a short story about the “final time of death” being “that moment sometime in the future when your name is spoke for the last time.” What a sobering concept – the notion that there will come a time when no one will ever speak my name again…no wonder the thought of a headstone comforts me.

I have worked on the ambulance (as an EMT) and in the emergency room (as a social worker) for the past six years. And, during that time I have seen a lot of deaths. A “good death” is one that comes to a very elderly person, suddenly and silently, without pain or suffering. An example would be having a stroke while sleeping. “He just slipped away,” is what those families say…What a nice way to die.

A “bad death” can take many forms, but it is always unexpected and traumatic, for the person and their loved ones. One of my jobs is to be with people and/or their loved ones while they die. Sometimes this happens quickly; other times it takes what seems like a very long time. During this time and afterward, while “the body is readied for transport” and the paperwork is completed, there is more time spent with the dead. I usually say a prayer, tell the person goodbye, and wish them Godspeed to whatever comes next for them.

Maybe because I’ve been around a lot of deaths (or maybe because I have an active imagination), in a lot of cases it feels like I can sense what the soul is doing, in relationship to the body during these final times. Sometimes, like in the case of a bad trauma, the soul seems to be gone already - nowhere near that body the paramedics roll in, CPR in progress. I sort of wonder, in the case of something like a bad wreck, if the soul is still back there at the scene, wondering what the heck just happened…

In other cases, the soul fights to stay in the body and on this earth. These are probably people who have been strong willed their whole life. Often they have large families gathered at the bedside. They have to be given permission, by the doctors and their loved ones, to go ahead and let go.

“It’s okay, Daddy,” a son or daughter will say. “We know how tired you are. It’s okay to stop fighting and just go home now…”

Sometimes, the soul seems to linger for awhile, and then just sort of fade away, either before or a short while after the time of death has been declared. In a lot of cases, it’s pretty obvious when the vitality, or light, or essence of what made that person that person is gone…Interesting, strange, humbling…

No matter what your thoughts on death are, there is one thing you can do to make a huge positive difference to your family and the doctors who treat you when your time comes – have an Advanced Directive and be sure the people who matter to you most know what it says and where it is.

The only thing worse than facing death or losing someone you love, is to do that without any kind of map showing the route. And, part of that map involves deciding how you want to die with regard to the many medical interventions that can, but don’t have to be, administered when your time comes.

There are a variety of websites that provide information on Advance Directives. Here are a few: www.legacywriter.com, www.caringinfo.org, www.liv-will1.uslivingwillregistry.com. So, please, check them out. It’s heartbreaking to watch a family try to make those difficult decisions at an already really difficult, sad time.

Home

Dorothy was right. There’s no place like home. I just got back from a week in Colorado (my home state), visiting family and old friends, and, it was wonderful. The air was dry, the temperatures cool; the crisp evenings and chilly early mornings made a jacket necessary. Imagine that – a jacket in August!

My dad lives just far enough from the foothills of the Rocky Mountains to have a marvelous view of those magnificent, still snow-topped peaks – yes, there is snow left in Colorado in August…And, he has a wheat farm out on the Eastern Plains, where you can see first hand those “purple mountain majesties” and “amber waves of grain” we sing about in “America the Beautiful.”

We visited the farm, and my Gramma – still kickin’ at 96. I did some hiking and took some really nice long walks. The family’s big on bird feeding, so I got to see some amazing hummingbird action – right up close. And, every evening, in addition to a lot of good food and loud laughter, there was a beautiful mountain sunset to be enjoyed.

My daughter went with me for the first part of the week, and she was amazed at how “happy and comfortable” (as she put it) I seemed to be, there in my native land, surrounded by my earliest family and oldest friends. “Why don’t you move back here, Mom?” she asked me, during one of our mountain walks.

And, that is a question that has haunted me since we moved to Georgia, some 21 years ago. Initially, I gave the Southern experiment two years – if it wasn’t working by then, we’d move back “home.” Then, we figured we couldn’t uproot the kids during elementary school, and by middle school, they were settled in. After that, my moving “back home” became after both kids graduated from high school. But, then they went to Eastern colleges, which meant if Mom wanted to see her offspring with any frequency, she’d have to stay put in Georgia a little while longer…

Surprise, surprise! Both kids married people from Georgia, found jobs in Georgia, settled down and made homes in Georgia, so here I am, “stuck” for good, if I want to continue to enjoy a close vital relationship with my kids, their spouses, my grand-dogs, and eventually, I hope, grandkids.

For years, my dad would ask, “When are you moving back?” And, for years, I’d say, “Maybe sometime soon, Pop.” I think we both saw the handwriting on the wall…He stopped asking a few years ago.

It’s not that Georgia isn’t nice. It is. It’s just it’s not what I grew up with and for that reason, it will never feel like home. When you live the first half of your life in a cool, dry place where the humidity never reaches 40-percent, you never get used to sweating the way I do here.

When you grow up with long open vistas and miles of sky above, you never get used to all the trees, and the short distance you can see ahead here. When you grow up with mountains always on one side of you, clearly indicating west, you never orient to which way is which because all there is to guide off of is a wall of greenery and trees...It goes on and on. The sky colors are different; the air smells different; I miss snow in the winter time. The short bursts of rain so welcome there take the form of days and days, and buckets and buckets, of rain here. And, the harshest cold a Colorado winter can throw at you has nothing on that bone-chilling, damp cold a Georgia January brings…

Conversely, and perhaps ironically, my kids grew up here, so their preferences – their version of “home” – is distinctly Southern. Neither of them likes the cold, and they don’t sweat nearly as much as I do. They grew up surrounded by lush greenery, so the Western landscape looks “sort of brown and dead” to them. While they like the mountains well enough, their preference is for the beach – because that’s where their childhood vacations have been. When they go to Colorado, after a while, they can’t wait to “get back home,” because of a Southern version of all the same kinds of reasons I love being in West.

I told my daughter, during our walk (and my Dad a little later), that after years of contemplation and comparison, I have decided my true home – the home where my heart is – will remain in the South. For as much as I love the places and people of my past, my current and future has been right here in Georgia for 21 years now, and I guess that means I’m here to stay.

Too Quiet

I heard the marching band practicing the other night when I was out in the yard. We live about a mile from the high school, so all that wafts our way is the sound of drums and, occasionally, some brass. It’s always a welcome sound – marching season starting back up. It reminds me of much less quiet times, when my kids were still home and in marching band, and our house was a stop-over after practice, and before games, and after games, and well, a lot of other times, too.

There for years, there was never any quiet in our house. The noise was constant; the activity was never ending; there was always something going on. At the time, I sometimes got tired of it. I used to yearn for some quiet time alone, even as I tried to imagine what such a thing would be like. Now, quiet time is pretty much all we have here…I miss having kids at home.

I always wanted to have a bunch of kids – such a big family that when the oldest ones were getting married, the littlest ones might just be starting school. Being a mom has always been my favorite job, and I never wanted it to end. (Not that grown children don’t benefit from a little mothering, too - it’s just not the same as having dirty little hands to hold and sweaty little heads to nuzzle…)

But economic reality stopped our family at two – a boy and a girl, ages 27 and 25 now. Our kids are close together in age – 13 months apart – so they were always in a collective sort of a stage. They potty trained at nearly same time, gave up car seats at nearly the same time, went to school one year then the next, and on and on it went, until they both needed cars at the same time, went off to college within a year of each other, and more recently, got married – both of them - within two years.

It’s been a whirlwind of activities, rites of passage, sleep-overs, school trips, plays, band and soccer, clubs, birthdays, holidays, having friends over, going off to college, coming home from college, going off to college again, then planning and executing two weddings – one held right here, at our home. Because they were only a year apart in school, my kids always had a large group of the same friends, which meant our house was always full, our fridge was often empty, and it was impossible to buy enough toilet paper or, in later years, keep enough coffee made.

I remember melting down in the car several times during the busiest of those years, while waiting for one or the other of my offspring to get out of yet another band or sports practice, school club or play practice, or lesson of some type. Those activities all had a way of running late, which meant I was too often late to pick up the other child and take him/her wherever he/she needed to be, which only added to the stress.

I remember wondering, during those melted-down times, how much longer I could handle working full-time, while being a decent parent who keeps the house relatively clean and makes sure there’s some food in the pantry, as well as providing 24:7 hospitality and shuttle service. (Back then, Mr. Clark traveled all the time, so in terms of on-site parenting, I was on my own…)

And, then, all at once, it ended.
Both kids grew up, got lives, and moved away.

Now, pretty much all I have is quiet time, and it’s not as precious, interesting and rewarding as I thought it would be.

The story isn’t as bleak as I have, perhaps, made it sound. I am happy and proud of my kids. They have jobs, and benefits, and spouses whom I love dearly. They both have homes that feel warm, welcoming and full of energy and love. Because they stayed close – one in Atlanta, the other in Athens – I get to see them often, and they still, at least on occasion, hang out with the same group of friends who used to cover our TV room floor on a sleep-over night.

I don’t have grandchildren yet, and I am in no hurry, since I have two “grand-dogs” who I see, dog sit, and spoil regularly. We’ve already established “what happens at Pinkie’s (my grandma name) stays at Pinkie’s,” so when the grandbabies arrive, there won’t be any surprises with regard to the amount of affection, treats, noise and happy chaos that will most certainly occur.

I believe things happen for a reason, and things work out the way they’re supposed to, so even though it’s often too quiet and sometimes lonely, it’s okay that I only had two children. It’s okay that both of them grew up and left at the same time. It’s okay that neither of them are in any hurry to have kids.

And, it’s okay that I have all this long yearned for quiet time…thankfully broken up at times, by the sound of a marching band practicing. I enjoy the flood of happy loud memories that it brings.

Too Much!

What is enough? And, how much is too much? These were the questions I pondered driving back from taking pictures of a child’s birthday party at an art studio in Dunwoody the other day.

The child is a lovely little girl. It was her third birthday. And, it appeared that a good time was had by all. But, the whole format of the party seemed like too much. There was a “teacher” who orchestrated the “activity,” which was to “make a very special box to put your wishes and other special things in.”

Nice concept. It’s just there was no one on the guest list older than three and the kids didn’t seem to fully get what was supposed to be going on. It was too much. First they had to put on “very special” aprons and party hats. Then they had to sit in a chair (for way too long for some of them) and try to paint small wooden letters that spelled their names. Then they had to paint the box. Then they had to glue the painted letters of their names to the box lid, along with some feathers and glitter and other “very special” things.

It seemed like a lot to complete in an hour, for a one, two or three year old. Their parents were there, attentively trying to help them and it felt like there were as many expectations in the room as there were balloons. By the time it was time to sing “Happy Birthday” and eat cake, the Birthday Girl and her guests seemed glassy-eyed and over-stimulated.

“When do we eat cake?” was the battle cry, as the little artists finished their boxes, washed their hands, and grabbed a juice box from the cooler. Playing with the ice in the cooler seemed to be more of a hit than making the very special boxes had been.

Another theme for these elaborate birthday parties is the gymnastics party at the kiddy gymnastics place. While a little more age-appropriate, these parties still seem to overwhelm. One of the parties I photographed – this one for a two-year-old – had water bottles labeled with the Birthday Boy’s face, candy kisses with Disney “Cars” stickers on them – applied by the Birthday Boy’s mother, party bags with the Birthday Boy’s face and “Cars” stickers on them, and, sadly, a complete melt down by the Birthday Boy himself. It was all just too much for a two-year-old…

I see too much, too often on the ring fingers of the brides I photograph, as well. I don’t know when it became mandatory to give a girl a $3,000-$6,000-or more engagement ring, but I rarely see a smaller one these days. And, the wedding band that follows is equally spectacular…What happened to the idea of “two young people just starting out” with a subtle, pair of rings that spoke of brighter things to come?

What does a husband buy his wife for later anniversaries if he started the marriage by giving her that much bling? How do you say, “Thank you for spending the last 30 years with me,” if the day you said, “I do” you decked your wife’s hand so grandly that it’s almost blinding to look at when she’s in the sun?

The necessity of the new car or truck payment is another “too much” for me. I see young nurses at work (at the hospital) heart broken that they only get six weeks of maternity leave, and tormented by child care and “getting the baby on a schedule” questions. Later these same young mothers are torn apart when their babies or toddlers get sick, and have to be in child care anyway, because mom can’t get off work.

Why do these women torture themselves this way? Because, they “have to make the car (or truck) payment.” Does it occur to these young families that if they drove older vehicles, there’d be more time to spend with the kids?

I read an article about how the size of the “American Dream” has grown since its’ inception in the 1950’s. Back then the average middle class home was 1,300-square feet; now it’s 2,400. It used to be common for siblings to share rooms. Now everyone has to have their own room, complete with separate bath and walk-in closet. Yards are bigger, rooms are bigger, and a two car garage is a must…

We’ve super-sized ourselves into a lifestyle that leaves us scrambling to make house payments and car payments, buy big engagement rings and plan elaborate parties for toddlers…

I don’t know where I’m going with this, except to say that this Recession may be a good thing. It may force us to scale back a bit, rethink some things, and reign in our expectations. My bet is those three-year-olds would’ve had just as much fun playing in a kiddy pool, then running wild in the yard after the frosting buzz set in. Less is more, but what a hard lesson that is to learn!